Girlhood and the Feminist Imaginary in Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Women’S Literature

GIRLHOOD AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC WOMEN’S LITERATURE By Tracy Wendt Lemaster A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 09/27/12 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Susan S. Friedman, Professor, English and Gender and Women’s Studies Thomas Schaub, Professor, English Jeffrey Steele, Professor, English Ellen Samuels, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies Julie D’Acci, Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies © Copyright by Tracy Wendt Lemaster 2012 All Rights Reserved i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Dissertation Abstract iii Introduction The Girl and the Woman Writer 1 Chapter One Girls’ Studies and Third Wave Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s 35 A Room of One’s Own and The Waves Chapter Two Othering the Girl: Agency, Madness, and Puberty in Simone de 82 Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Chapter Three Celie’s Psychodrama: Neuroscience, Teenage Cognition, and the 133 Epistolary Form in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple Chapter Four Girlhood Biopolitics in Sapphire’s Push: Obesity, Sexual Arousal, 173 and HIV Infection Works Cited 218 ii Acknowledgements I am so grateful to the many people who have helped me write this dissertation throughout the years. Foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Susan Friedman, for believing in this project’s focus on the relatively new, developing subfield field of Girls’ Studies, and for having the confidence in me to create literary dialogues with its interdisciplinary research. Susan’s encouragement and insight was invaluable and I could not have asked for a better mentor. I would also like to thank Ellen Samuels for her steadfast support in my professionalization and suggestions of important frameworks in this project that shaped it overall. My remaining committee members, Tom Schaub, Jeffrey Steele, and Julie D’Acci, also contributed much-needed guidance and support for conceptualizing and writing this project. Words cannot express my appreciation to my family for their love. My parents, Bob and Terry, have supported my pursuit of literary studies since I was young. Their unending patience throughout me completing this PhD is remarkable, particularly in these final years when both distance and medical ailments made academics seem like less of a priority. They continue to encourage and value my work as selfless parents. My loving husband, Richard, made this degree possible with his emotional, intellectual, and practical support. He remains my hero and marrying him my greatest decision. This dissertation is, without question, for him. Finally, I write this acknowledgement section while seven months pregnant. My baby has grown and kicked inside me during many typing sessions. While I have not even met my first child, I know he/she is my greatest achievement, and my life’s personal and professional purpose. iii Abstract This dissertation demonstrates that the figure of the girl dominates scenes of writing in foundational twentieth-century feminist theory and literature, yet girls are collectively marginalized as these texts privilege theories of women’s authorship. I examine four texts that are emblematic of the theories of women’s creativity, feminisms, and historical moments of their time: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Sapphire’s Push. These texts, I argue, exhibit a latent textual “anxiety” about girl culture as they theorize women’s writing and culture. Because they also foreground how the sexual self affects creativity, I examine girls’ embodied sexuality as distinct from adult women’s sexuality, revealing that psychosexual creative conflict in girlhood shapes authorship and activism. My project draws from the developing field of Girls’ Studies that treats female adolescence as its own subjectivity category. This is the first literary studies project to use Girls’ Studies research on real teen girls’ neurology, biology, psychology, and sociology. My project argues that girlhood writing and sexuality follow a trajectory in the texts under consideration of increasing feminist recognition and development. The girl writer progresses from an abstract, imagined image of writing in Virginia Woolf to a representational subject analyzing her own process of writing in Sapphire. Across these four texts, girlhood sexuality progresses from allegories of the girl’s conflicted sexual self-consciousness to explicit descriptions by the girl protagonist of her body’s sexual development, disease, and sensation. Chapter 1 on A Room of One’s Own shows that girls surface as allegorical figures without voice who fictionalize Woolf’s theories of women’s circumscribed authorship. Using Girls’ Studies social science research on real girls’ articulations of their sexual self-consciousness, I argue that Woolf’s scenes of girls’ artistic/erotic writing reflect social censorship of girls’ sexuality. iv Chapter 2 on The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir treats the girl as an actual agent of written material through her frequent, brief excerpts of real adolescent girls’ writings. While Beauvoir reflects openly on girls’ sexual feelings as demonstrated by their writings, she theorizes that the girl’s maturational body and narrative modes are detrimental to the psychological self, which I challenge with empirical research on teen girls’ textual agency. Chapter 3 on The Color Purple shows that Walker offers a sustained, direct representation of the girl writer as she questions her sexual body and sexual identity, questioning that distinguishes the girl’s empowerment. I apply neuroscientific studies on teenage cognitive impairment from sexual abuse to representations of Celie and Nettie’s psychological modes, arguing that the novel’s epistolary form portrays a single psyche split by sexual trauma into different aspects of developmental girlhood. My final chapter on Sapphire’s Push examines how Precious explicitly describes her prematurely developed, traumatically aroused, and HIV-positive teen body while she self-consciously reflects on the act of writing and on herself as a “poet.” Using biological research on African American girls’ earlier menstruation and increasing HIV infection, I argue that Precious’s sexual states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, making her biopolitical embodiment highlight age as intersecting racial invisibility. Lastly, this dissertation demonstrates that women authors’ textual negotiation of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality reflects an epistemological tension regarding the place of the girl in feminist theory. Girlhood contrasts feminist discourses on maturity, autonomy, and individualism as defining the subject. Girlhood also contradicts the validation of feminist consciousness through struggles, experience, and knowledge acquired in adulthood. If Women’s Studies often defines feminist subjectivity against qualities associated with youth, then discounting girls could be seen as theoretically necessary for defining feminism. The girl’s v paradoxical imbrication yet marginalization within feminist subjecthood surfaces in how the authors in my project use “the girl” as an anxious aesthetic strategy for representing the emergent woman writer. By examining girlhood identity politics in literature theorizing women’s identity politics, I show how the girl evolves in feminist imaginaries from an integral though marginalized trope in feminist theory about women to the central figure articulating feminist politics about girls. 1 Introduction: The Girl and the Woman Writer Sometimes I think inside me is a girl child who refuses to die. She has become a dark metaphoric creature. She flaps her wings so that I can learn to look and see, so I can write. Meena Alexander, “Lyric in a Time of Violence” (25) In the 2004 essay collection, Word: On Being a [Woman] Writer, where well-known international authors examine, embrace, and expand ideas of “the woman writer,” representations of girls and girlhood writing surface throughout. The Preface, for example, imagines both a literal audience of youth reading the anthology and a psychically-present youthful self when writing as an adult. Biographical references to writing and publishing in the teen years frequently occur in contributor summaries preceding the essays. Literary representations of girlhood authorship, embodiment, and sexuality appear in the majority of the collection. Notably, several essays focus exclusively on girls, such as June Jordan’s piece on Phillis Wheatley that honors “this girl, this first Black poet in America” as a “genius teenager” (172-73). My dissertation engages these various evocations of “the girl” – as living subject, as literary representation, as psychic figuration, and as aesthetic strategy – in questions of women’s authorship. Overall, I ask, where is “the girl” in “the woman writer”? I argue that girls dominate scenes of writing and modes of narrativity in foundational twentieth-century feminist literature, yet girls are collectively marginalized to privilege theories of women, women’s writing, and women’s social position. The girl’s simultaneous dominance and dubiousness in scenes of writing is evident in the writers’ use of palimpsest, rhetorical shift, psychodrama, overrepresentation, and allegory. These formal treatments reveal a latent textual “anxiety” about girl culture in literature

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